Sixty-nine years ago, at about 9.30am in London, Britain’s ruling classes were lulled into an illusionary sense of renewed global power. Their old glories seemed to arise from radioactive ashes in the Australian sky as Her Majesty’s first nuclear bomb test, aptly christened Operation Hurricane, was detonated from HMS Plym, a navy frigate anchored in a lagoon close to the Monte Bello islands, right off the north west coast of Australia. History was made: Britain had become the third nuclear power, following in the footsteps of the United States and the Soviet Union.

But this controlled explosion, in the works for over a decade, was far from a once-off. Between 1952 and 1963, the British government—welcomed with open arms by avowed empire loyalist prime minister Robert Menzies—conducted twelve nuclear test explosions and up to 600 ‘minor trials’ in both the outback and in sites off the west Australian coast, the most notable of which were seven large tests at the Maralinga site in South Australia. According to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, the minor trials alone ‘dispersed 24.4 kg of plutonium in 50,000 fragments, berylium, and eight tonnes of uranium.’

To understand these long-buried events, we must turn back to March 1940, when physicists working from the University of Birmingham, Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls, released the Frisch–Peierls memorandum, which suggested that fission could make an atomic bomb. This triggered the beginning, in earnest, of a determined drive by the British state to develop a Union Jack-embossed weapon of mass destruction.

By 1947, cross-party support for the construction of such a weapon had been straightforwardly achieved, with nuclear weapons viewed—at least rhetorically—as a defensive imperative. A Cabinet committee in January 1947 led to creation of the High Explosive Research project, placed under the stewardship of William Penney, whose research at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment led directly to Operation Hurricane.

Not only did the Labour government of the time led by Clement Atlee successfully hide the £100 million preparatory costs from the House of Commons; they were forced, embarrassingly, to find another partner because the Americans refused to provide a test site after some spy scandals involving Soviet infiltration sowed distrust between the two nations. Despite this ego-bruising setback, the weapons had to be tested somewhere. Menzies was approached in secret in September 1950, from which an agreement emerged that Australia would host a test at Monte Bello. Less than twelve months later, British troops were mobilised.

For the follow-up test to the initial Monte Bello blast, the clandestine atomic bomb team located a vast expanse of the Great Victoria Desert, close to 300 miles from the nearest town, Woomera, which they nicknamed Emu Field. Plans were soon set in motion for a second test, and on 15 October 1953, the first of the Totem devices was detonated.

Witnessing the radioactive fallout spewing across their homeland, local indigenous people gave the cloud a name: ‘puyu’ (roughly translated as black mist). They reported sore eyes, blindness, skin rashes, diarrhoea, vomiting, and fever. Accounts were also provided of the early death of entire families. And yet, local people weren’t the only guinea pigs in this decade-long saga: some 20,000 British military personnel, 2,000 civilians, and 16,000 Australian servicemen were also sent to participate in the tests.

Although nearly impossible to prove causality in such situations, a government study following Australian veterans over an 18-year period from 1982 found they had 23 percent higher rates of cancer and 18 percent more deaths from cancers than the general population. In Beyond Belief: The British Bomb Tests: Australia’s Veterans Speak Out, Dick Sundstrom, a nuclear test veteran, blames the explosion on the 170 skin cancers and low-grade B-cell lymphoma he had removed, and claims that the fact his daughter was ‘born with a hole in her back’ must be seen as a consequence of his exposure to radiation.

On several occasions during and after tests, local indigenous people apparently wandered into the test area. When an unwitting family was discovered in a radioactive crater, soldiers were allegedly barked at by a superior that ‘the person who let this out to the papers, or press or Parliament, would be tried for treason.’

No small wonder, then, that a veil of secrecy has enshrouded this sordid part of British history. In 2018, thousands of archive files relating to Britain’s nuclear weapons and atomic energy programmes were withdrawn by the National Archives without warning, under instruction of the government’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority. But survivors like Yami Lester, a Yankunytjatjara elder who was blinded by the tests, remembered clearly:

‘It was in the morning, around seven. I was just playing with the other kids. That’s when the bomb went off. I remember the noise, it was a strange noise, not loud, not like anything I’d ever heard before. The earth shook at the same time; we could feel the whole place move… It wasn’t long after that a black smoke came through. A strange black smoke, it was shiny and oily. A few hours later we all got crook, every one of us. We were all vomiting; we had diarrhoea, skin rashes and sore eyes. I had really sore eyes. They were so sore I couldn’t open them for two or three weeks. Some of the older people, they died. They were too weak to survive all of the sickness. The closest clinic was 400 miles away.’

As some scholars have documented, it was peace movement pressure from below, among other things, that led to the Australian government creating, in 1985, a Royal Commission into British tests in Australia. James McClelland, who headed the commission, expressed in no uncertain terms that ‘the effect of fall-out was not recognized by the safety committee’.

Distilling the reactionary attitudes of British and Australian elites at the time was Mr Alan Butement, chief scientist to the Australian government, who said of one officer who displayed compassion for the protection of the local indigineous peoples: ‘He is apparently placing the affairs of a handful of natives above those of the British Commonwealth.’ Imperialist hubris is what gave them an unshakable belief that the land was empty and theirs to obliterate and denature.

By 1992, there were rumblings that Australia would take the UK to the International Court of Justice to achieve compensation. The following year, however, Australia accepted the UK’s offer of £20 million as the full and final settlement of the costs of the clean-up. Yet, as the Royal Commission recommended, another cleanup was required, completed in 2000 at a cost of AUD$108 million.

There is only so much that decontamination projects and clean-ups can do: the physical remnants will be around in Australia for thousands of years to come. Local peoples were deemed expendable at the time by the British and Australian governments, and they are still at risk today.

Just this year, Australian researchers found that radioactive particles released during the nuclear tests in Maralinga remain highly reactive, leading to a ‘sustained and prolonged release of plutonium into the ecosystem’. This is particularly undesirable for the local Anangu people, for whom hunting, gathering, and cooking local-grown produce from the lands is still a rite of passage. As Karina Lester, a campaigner for justice for the tests and member of the Anangu community, observed: ‘This haunting has been from generation to generation.’